Now this is just plain spiffy (see what I did there? Where else can you get this quality of high-larious wit?), an electric remote control airliner meant to be flown indoors. I don;t know what the wings are made of, but they are clearly low mass… and the fuselage is inflatable, and probably filled with helium.

A reminder: the 1/48 scale “Men Into Space” kit that I mastered for Fantastic Plastic is available for purchase.

Fantastic Plastic also has several copies of the SHIELD Helicarrier and Space Station V that I mastered for ’em…

Here’s the thing: for *decades* I never had much use for the Star Destroyer from Star Wars. It just seemed “meh” as a design. But for reasons at best unclear, a few years ago the design started to grow on me. And the timing has been pretty good.

For most of the last 39 years, if you wanted a model of the Star Destroyer, you had one option, the MPC kit. And it, in a word, kinda sucked. It was pretty much what you’d expect from a 1970’s sci-fi model… it more or less replicated the shape of the thing, but completely cheaped out on accuracy and details. And even so, for many years the only way to get one of these things was to shell out a bucket of money on EBay.

But no more. There are several good options if you want a nice Star Destroyer to display. NOTE: you *should* be able to see illustrated links to Amazon items. But some browsers /ad blockers don’t show them, so hopefully the text links work.

First up: Disney has had a diecast metal Star Destroyer available for a few years now. It’s quite good in terms of accuracy and detail, and is a good size for a die cast replica – about 9 inches long.

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Bandai, a Japanese model kit company, has a nice if almost microscopically small (well… three inches or so) snap-together kit available. It seems to be pretty accurate and is about as detailed as practical for something of its size. And it’s cheap.

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Revell has released a large-ish (about 16 inches long) snap-together Star Destroyer kit. Like the other Star Wars models they’ve released since The Force Awakens, this comes with some toy-like features and a built-in electronics module that provides sounds and LED lighting. That said, it’s really pretty good. The accuracy overall seems pretty good and detail – except for the irritating “landing gear” on the underside that takes the place of a proper display stand – is excellent. t has been a number of years since I’ve put together a model kit, but this came together just in the last couple days in spare moments. I spent substantially more time in painting it than assembly… the parts come bagged rather than on a sprue, and there are essentially no issues with flash. The kit can be assembled straight out of the box with no glue or trimming and produce a respectable replica… except for reworking the “landing gear,” I put mine together in perhaps half an hour.

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I admit to admiring the Revell Star Destroyer I’ve put together and painted. I think it looks Damn Good. But as I looked at it, it seemed to me that the bridge module looks like it might be a bit wide, so I looked it up online to see if there was any discussion of that. In short… it seems that the bridge module *is* a bit wide (the hypothesis seems to be that the model was based not on the filming miniatures or a CG model made for Rogue One, but the CG models made for “Battlefront” which have the wider bridges). But more importantly, in looking this up, I found several references to yet another Star Destroyer model kit on the horizon. This time it’s coming from the Russian model company Zvezda. It’s not out yet in the West, but it seems to be available in Russia itself. It’s unclear if it *will* be released in the West, and if so, for how much (I saw numerous references to $80-$130 dollars).

But from what I can see, this is the first Holy Crap model of the Star Destroyer that you can obtain without having to sell your car. Behold this unboxing video:

There appear to be some somewhat inexplicable choices with the Zvezda kit. The Revell kit, for example, has eight separate turbolaser turrets, which snap in and can rotate; the Zvezda kit, probably twice the size, seemingly has the turrets in a fixed position. This was likely done to minimize cost, and is not really that big of a deal given how small they are.

The Revell kit is I think the best deal for the money, even with the too-wide bridge module. The laid-back modeler won’t notice, and may even appreciate the “landing gear;” for the sticklers, I’m sure someone will crank out a replacement bridge in resin or on Shapeways if they haven’t already. The Zvezda kit seems like it’ll be the new benchmark in Star Destroyer Awesomeness, just as the 1/350 Enterprises from Polar Lights reset the stage for Trek. But as with the PL Enterprises, the 60+ centimeter Star Destroyer might prove to be problematically large for many people. Of course, like the Bluetooth Communicator Cell Phones I posted about a while back, having one of those monsters proudly displayed in your home might be just the thing if you want to make sure that the ladies view you as Undatable.

Since I have cemented that status for myself, if I see one of the Zvezda monsters – and if I can afford it – I’m’a gettin’ me one.

This video has it all:

Unbuilt aircraft concept
Scale model (wind tunnel model) construction
Cyanotype Blueprints
Complete lack of an audio track

The obvious question that this video raises is… what happened with the model? Most wind tunnel models end up getting scrapped – shredded and melted down to recycle the metal. but every now and then one escapes. The company keeps it for display, or in an archive, or sometimes an employee simply takes it home. Sometimes they end up on EBay.

Here’s another photo of the lifting body mockup I showed a month ago. Here you can see that the full display – apparently a USAF public relations item – included a more or less full length booster, presumably a Titan II. It’s not the best angle, but it *kinda* looks like this might be just the first stage of the Titan II (or a round tube resembling one) without a second stage. It’s doubtful that there was ever a plan to launch a one-man lifting body atop a single Titan II first stage; it would be distinctly suborbital, and without some deep throttling the acceleration would probably be pretty crushing.

When i last posted this, I mentioned that photos of this were shown “many times.” I wrote that because I remember seeing such photos… but once I started actually looking for them they turn out to be rather hard to find. I imagine I must’ve seen the photos in 1960’s magazines or such. Two more not terribly helpful photos are available HERE and

Boom Technology, a company working towards a supersonic passenger transport, is unveiling in Denver the mockup of their “XB-1,” a 1/3 scale technology demonstrator.

A supersonic jet faster than the Concorde will get public design debut in Centennial

See the link above for some hugenormous photos, but here’s what the thing looks like:

To me the XB-1 looks like the Rose Mach Buster and a T-38 got a little drunk and made the plane with two backs, then slathered the baby with Bondo and sanded real, real smooth.

Boom Technology is working towards a commercial SST with a cruise speed of Mach 2.2, 44 passengers and transAtlantic range. They are hoping to reduce sonic boom to levels low enough that the FAA will let them fly overland, but as the law is currently written I don’t think they could legally do it if their plane was utterly silent. Getting the bureaucrats and politicians to change the regulations that stifle progress is probably a much bigger chore than designing a supersonic jet that’s actually commercially viable.

This YouTuber makes quad-drone and other flying RC Star Wars vehicles. In my opinion, it’s a toss-up whether his best is the Imperial Probe Droid or the Imperial Shuttle. I can see both being turned into successful commercial products. The probe droid needs a way to land other than being grabbed…

I’m looking for one of the Halcyon model kits of the Sulaco. I don’t need it to be mint-in-box, just complete and more or less intact. It can be had on ebay, but at very inflated prices. So if anyone has one they want to unload, let’s talk.

In the previous installment I worked out what I think the diameter of the individual modules is on the very large Lockheed Space station in this piece of art:

At the time I devoted my efforts to diameter and just kinda half-assed the module length. Now behold, in this latest installment of Don’t You Have Anything Better To Do Theater as I work out the module length with greater precision and less guesswork, using image processing programs (specifically Paint Shop Pro) and CAD programs (specifically Rhino 3D).